Every year is a great year to be a music obsessive. 2025 was a year that felt like music was both a catalyst for change and the much needed escape hatch.

It was also a year where profit-driven corporations went gloves off with non-consensual AI and humanity raised its collective fist aloft. Being human, whether that's being wonderfully weird or painfully honest or building sonic landscapes peppered with easter eggs for lyric-decoding fans, feels like the dominant theme in all the records we adored this year.

Resistance, rage and resilience feature too but those themes are perhaps a given every year if you've been paying attention to our album of the year lists for the last 25 years.

We'll share our top 10 later this week but for spoilers, listen to this week's Drowned in Sound podcast where we chat through our favourites and a pile of honourable mentions. Listen on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

Anyway, in the words of Stealing Sheep, let's gooooooooooooo!

Head to http://drownedinsound.org for our new website and sign up to the mailing list to never miss our latest posts filled with music recommendations and ways to empower music fans.

Brand-new anachronism from Z-Neo

Fault-less -  very-nearly-convincing as time travel

release rationale

"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a '92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP's and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".

I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?

The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific  - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!

Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point. 

People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity.... 

Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze.  When you factor in the international factor. 

Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music. 

You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a  Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point... 

Talking of spectral imaginings... 

Somehow missed this -  from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set 

release irrationale 

The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.

Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides... 

Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It's a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.

If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down...  dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity

SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture's, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF's Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture's work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.

SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.

Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork -  Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:

Over the past few years, I've been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw's Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica's back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.

A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I'd drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.

One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D's Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek's The Water Margin, and Intense's The Quickening.

During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.

There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF's 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There's enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.

Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.

The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles' 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd's The Wall, Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, and Future Sound of London's Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.

The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle's genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle's Johnny, Subnation's Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer's Ricky-a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine 'Somewhere About Town'.

The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM's DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It's well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.

Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a 'first aid kit', packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn't take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he'd remind his groggy listeners that it was "time to draw for the First Aid Kit," creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn't get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was "a bridge too far," but if they made it, Jinx would say, "taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton." Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More ("What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!"), and end with his signature send-off: "Seeeeeeeeee ya!"

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Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie" 

That's from over ten years ago) 

Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality

This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"

Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat

Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick

Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a  a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew. 

release rationale: 

I've been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn't know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.

Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG's London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the "we got the vibes, yo" lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I'm grinning from ear to ear.

Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London's legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.

Fast forward 30 years, and I'm in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I've always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I've been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.

Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It's a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour! 

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The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit

Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania

Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase.

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far...

I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the end of time.

Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit?)

So despite the enormity I thought I would give the entire list a listen, in both categories. (There's also a list of mixes). 

I got about a third of the way into the albums, skipping the ones I already knew. But then - as always seems to happen with such undertakings (e.g. the enormous playlists of an artist's entire discography that you might pull together yourself, or of a genre)...  inevitably the will to carry on crumbles away. It's just too daunting. It comes to feel like work. As a way of discovering things, it's not the way that the music you end up loving generally tumbles into your life. Especially not with dance music, which is most meaningfully encountered in a club and in the thick of a crowd. 

But I did hear some things I'd never heard that I really liked, along with quite a lot of things that were excellent but ultimately sounded like superior-sound-design updates of  sono-rhythmic ideas that existed in rawer form in the 1990s.  

As always happens with these canon-making pushes by publications, I was surprised by how few of the artists or works that I love figure in these lists. (And quite often when an artist I like did get mentioned, the track honored wasn't what I would have selected). 

But you know what - people are different!  

So much music - electronic, dance, everything else - came out in the 21st Century that entirely different cartographies and canons can be constructed that barely overlap with your own trajectory as a listener or personal pantheon. 

One new-to-me tune in the RA list that I really liked

Now if you know anything about where I'm coming from, in terms of what I like in dance music, it makes perfect sense that this is a tune that would appeal.   It's fresh and exciting but audibly in the tradition of "Party People". 

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I'm not sure how much this RA list is ultimately based on the votes of the contributors and how much determined by decree from above, but they did ask me for a list of nominations, albeit only in the overlapping categories of hauntology / ambient / conceptronica. This is what I suggested, which is unranked: 

ALBUMS

Boards of Canada - Geogaddi

The Focus Group - Hey Let Loose Your Love

Oneohtrix Point Never - Rifts

Belbury Poly - The Willows

The Advisory Circle - Other Channels

Mordant Music - Dead Air

Moon Wiring Club - An Audience of Art Deco Eyes

Rashad Becker - Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time

Debit - The Long Count

Runners up (unasked for, I couldn't resist supplying)

Lo Five - Geography of the Abyss

Dolphins into the Future - On Seafaring Isolation

Lee Gamble - Diversions -  1994-96

eMMplekz - Rook to TN34

Roj - The Transactional Dharma of Roj

Hybrid Palms - Pacific Image

ML Buch - Suntub

Second Woman - S/W

Huerco S - For Those of You Who Have Never

Burial - debut album

patten - Mirage FM

TRACKS

Mark Van Hoen - Holy Me

eMMplekz - Gloomy Leper Techno

The Focus Group - Modern Harp

Oneohtrix Point Never - Physical Memory

The Advisory Circle - Sundial

Holly Herndon - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

James Blake - If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Burial - South London Boroughs

Belbury Poly - Caermaen

People Like Us - World of Wonder (Why We're Here)

Moon Wiring Club - Mademoiselle Marionette

MIX

bit stumped here, I don't tend to remembrance mixes like other folks do, but then I thought, "oh yes, there's - 

The Arkiteket - The Deep Ark

And then when I saw their list, I slapped my forehead with a 'gah' and realized I really should have - and really would have - included this mix: 

Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo (Japan, 1980-86) - by Spencer Doran

And the follow up Vol 2 was great too. 

It's especially amnesiac of me given that in this big piece on Ambient / New Age as a phenom of the 2010s written for Resident Advisor, these mixes feature prominently (along with the Japanese interior music / 4th world compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 plus quotes from Doran in his Visible Cloaks guise). 

Talking of those who remembrance mixes, here's mixologist (and RA 2000-2025 contributor) Michaelangelos Matos's faves 

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Maybe, maybe,  I'll go back and finish that 2000-2025 albums list... do it in stages... then do the tracks... and maybe even the mixes. 

I already tried and enjoyed this mix which sounded intriguing from the write-up and mixologist Nono Gigsta's side reflections

https://soundcloud.com/gigstab/freerotation-2024-the-house-of-crocodiles-part-2-live-recording

Amid the near-infinity of sources out of which it is woven, this new-to-me tune jumped out particularly

Which itself contains a sample of - or perhaps more accurately, is a re-edit of? - something I dimly recognise (from being sampled elsewhere - some track on Reinforced?) but the source song "Misdemeanor" is new-to-me and quite delicious, sort of avant-ized Jackson 5

Less delicious is learning about the actual misdemeanor the artist would much later commit.... Wiki Fear strikes again, or at least, it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have read the offending entry 

Ah, Anon comes through in the comments with the ardkore jungle tune that samples Foster Sylvers - not 4 Hero and crew but M-Beat 

Here's another use (out of loads and loads in hip hop etc)

Here's a Misdemeanor sample-chain playlist

Andrew O'Hagan's novel 'Mayflies' (2020) is his well-observed take on the theme of a group of young friends meeting up again in later life, in this case music and film-obsessed Scottish teenagers in the mid-1980s who bond over a weekend in Manchester and whose later lives aren't quite the adventures they hoped for.

I can only assume there is something of O'Hagan's own youth in this, and it is centred around some real events - the main one being the Factory records 'Festival of the Tenth Summer' held on 19 July 1986 at the Greater Manchester Exhibition (GMEX) Centre to mark the anniversary of the two famous Sex Pistols gigs at the city's Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 1976. 

The bands playing at the 1986 event included several founded by people who had been at one or both of the Pistols gigs, including The Smiths, The Fall and New Order (one of the characters in 'Mayflies' mistakenly mentions Magazine playing, they had split up by this point, but Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks was on the bill). O'Hagan describes the Fall's Mark E Smith as 'the Fine Fare Baudelaire... sloping about the stage. He didn't sing the words, he inebriated them'. He also enthuses over peak era Smiths, 'romantic and wronged and fierce and sublime, with haircuts like agendas'.

On the night before, the Shop Assistants played at the International in Anson Road, Manchester and O'Hagan gives a good account of the indie-pop vibe: 'She swayed with composed embarrassment, the sort of embarrassment all members of small independent bands had then, a form of shyness, or stage absence, that seemed to go well with their accidentally perfect tunes'

There is also a visit to the pre-acid house Hacienda with dancing to 'Candyskin' by the Fire Engines.

Thirty years later, dancing at a wedding, narrator James is less enthusiastic: 'It used to be so natural, dancing. Because the music defined you and the heart was in step. Then it leaves you. Or does it? Saturday night changes and your body forgets the old compliance. You're not part of it any more and your feet hesitate and your arms stay close to your sides. It's there somewhere, the easy rhythm from other rooms and other occasions, and you're half convinced it will soon come back. It's not the moves - the moves are there - but your connection to the music has become nostalgic, so the body is responding not to a discovery but to an old, dear echo'.

I'm not sure that it is inevitable that music becomes less exciting as you get older - you can discover whole new genres that you previously overlooked - but perhaps it is true that much music becomes part of your past and can never be heard for the first time again.

From 'Luton Street Press' (December 1975), an alternative take on the 12 days of Christmas:

More Luton stuff:

Marsh House Luton - from punk to henge

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Irish Artists for Palestine have issued a powerful statement in solidarity with the pro-Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Britain. It is signed by most of the great Irish musicians active today (Kneecap, Fontaines DC, Mary Wallopers, Christy Moore, The Pogues, Kevin Rowland, David Holmes), as well as writers and other cultural figures (including Sally Rooney, Annie Mac and Aisling Bea):

'We, Irish Artists for Palestine,  write to express our solidarity with the political prisoners currently engaged in hunger strike within British prisons. Their decision to place their bodies on the line is a profound act of resistance — one that echoes the long histories of both Irish and Palestinian political prisoners who have used hunger strike as a non-violent act of sacrifice to assert their dignity in the face of state violence and repression. This collective protest is the largest hunger strike in British prisons since the 1981 hunger strikes, and it demands urgent public attention. 

The prisoners — Qesser Zuhrah, Teuta Hoxha, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed (the Filton 24), Amu Gib, Jon Cink, Umer Khalid and Lewie Chiaramello (Brize Norton 5) - have been incarcerated by the state without trial for allegedly protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza, in which the British government has been actively complicit. Some individuals have been imprisoned for over a year without trial and it will be up to two years before they are heard. This is a grotesque violation of the UK's standard pre-trial custody time limit of six months. 

Prisoners have now entered their fifth week without food. Their bodies are deteriorating, with five hospitalisatjons so far and, the risks to their lives are escalating rapidly. Throughout this period. their basic rights have been heavily restricted and their demands have gone unanswered. Mainstream media outlets remain silent on the issue and there has been little to no coverage of this protest or of their demands. 

The hunger strikers have five demands:

1. End to all prison censorship and withholding of all letters, phone calls and books 

2. Immediate bail for an Palestine Action prisoners currently held in UK prisons 

3. Right to a fair trial for all Palestine Action prisoners held in UK prisons 

4. Deproscription of Palestine Action and the removal of its terror classification 

5. Shutdown of all Elbit Systems sites and subsidiaries in the UK 

We, the undersigned, call on the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Justice Secretary David Lammy. MPs and public representatives across Britain and Ireland to take immediate action, using all parliamentary and civic channels available to ensure these demands are addressed with urgency and transparency. 

We  demand that media organisations uphold their duty to the public by reporting the hunger strike, as well as the demands of the hunger strikers, to the public at this critical stage.

We believe this state repression is unfolding within a wider global crackdown and criminalisation of the Palestine solidarity movement. Increasingly, artists, activists and other dissenting voices are being censored, silenced, or smeared with baseless 'terror' allegations as a means of suppressing political  expression. These systemic and structural efforts to marginalise dissent affect all of us — not only those targeted at the moment. 

Our solidarity with the hunger strikers is rooted in our broader commitment to freedom and justice for the Palestinian people who have faced seventy eight years of occupation and over two years of genocide in Gaza. There are currently 3,368 Palestinian prisoners being held hostage in Israeli prisons under administrative detention, without a trial. 

We stand with the hunger strikers, Palestinian hostages and with all those who continue to struggle for freedom and justice in Palestine. 

In Solidarity, 

Irish Artists for Palestine 

I went to see Luton punk band UK Decay at a rare hometown gig at the Luton Hat Factory arts centre last Saturday (8/11/2025).  As expected a peak of their set was their 1980 song 'For my country' with its chorus 'for the honour, I don't ask why, it's my pleasure, my honour to die, for my country.'

The song riffs on Wilfred Owen's First World War poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est' which contrasts the reality of soldiers 'guttering, choking, drowning' in a gas attack with 'The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ('It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country').

The poetry of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other First World War poets had a big impact on the first punk generation. Penny Rimbaud of Crass has credited Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), which set Owen's poems to music, as a key influence on his pacifism. But I think most of us probably encountered these poems in school and/or through Brian Gardner's anthology 'Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914-1918', first published in 1964 and reissued in a 1976 paperback edition. A lot of punk anti-war sentiments were expressed through an imagery from this time, and UK Decay's song is a good example from its lyrics to its sleeve.

More Luton stuff:

Marsh House Luton - from punk to henge

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Sorry to hear of the passing today of D'Angelo. Quite a lot of obituaries focusing quite rightly on his sexy neo-soul, but some tough politics in there too. His 2010 album 'Black Messiah' is a classic of radical black liberation theology, the track '1000 deaths' including a sample from murdered Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton:

'Because the people that we're asking for peace

They′re a bunch of megalomaniac war-mongers and they don't even understand what peace means

But we′ve got to fight 'em, we've got to struggle with them

To make them understand what peace means'

And here's an interesting take on the Cocteau Twins

Early on, Jack was one of Sounds's main writers about reggae and dancehall. Jamaican music,  as I noted here, received sustained and serious coverage by the paper, far more than you'd imagine given its reputation as an oracle for Oi! and NWBHM. You'll find many pieces by Jack in that post. 

As I also noted in an earlier post here, his pen name is possibly an alias taken from the science fiction novel Bug Jack Barron. 

Looking at the Rock Back Pages bio, I see Jack actually wrote for a while for Melody Maker, in 1998, a good while after my time there was up. This makes him one of those rare examples of the "inkie clean sweep" - someone who wrote for all three leading UK weeklies. (Another would be Vivien Goldman). 

 (Sorry - I don't count Record Mirror as "leading". Mind you, there are even-rarer examples of people who wrote for all four, I believe). 

Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the parish hall party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.

The anniversary celebration came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but clean forgot about my other favorite record label of the 21st Century, Ghost Box.   The two imprints seemed linked in my mind as heroic projects - both in their different ways manifestations of archive fever, the disinterment of buried futures.... and sources of immense ongoing pleasure for this listener.   

My feelings about Ghost Box are expressed best in this thing I wrote for the 10th Anniversary in 2015. 

Twenty years - goodness me, how time has flown by! Two whole decades since me and the late Reverend Fisher started rambling on about hauntology (although of course the entity had been taking nebulous form for a goodly while before its christening).  

Chiltern Radio's Emilie Friedlander and Andrea Domanick kindly invited me to chat with them about the anniversary for their show Cujo (short for The Culture Journalist) . You can eavesdrop on the witterings over here.   

Further musings on this merry-melancholy subject at the end of this newsletter, but first some new news - activity in the parish. 

A bursting hamper of Moon Wiring Club music - the double-CD / double-LP  Gruesome Shrewd and a cassette, Grisly Exaggerated - across which Ian Hodgson develops a new sound, at once recognisably MWC and a defamiliarizing extension. Avail yourself of the "Grisly Bundle" at his online shoppe and get a taster with this film below.

Trying to capture its qualities for myself, a couple of phrases sprung to mind...."Time becomes a quicksand" is one, and the other  is "stretchy". As it happens, Ian himself uses the phrase "endless elongation" in the release-rationale below. 

These tracks reminds me of the process by which Brighton or Blackpool rock is made: a thick slab of taffy gets extruded out to enormous length, in the process thinning out while still retaining its internal patterning.  It's the vocal element, more pronounced and grotesquely deformed than ever, that forms the "lettering" inside the stick of rock that is each sprawling track on Gruesome and Grisly.  

As it turns out, the idea of tooth-enamel-eroding souvenir treats bought at the seaside is a suitable  thought given that the albums are loosely inspired by coach tours and the sensation of temporal suspension experienced while on holiday. Take it away, Ian: 

"One of the main aesthetic influences was what I describe as 'Coach World' ~ that feeling on a holiday (or long journey) that you've got to spend 18 hours on a coach. At first you think 'I'm going to snap' but then after 3 hours you get into a different rhythm and before long (after 8 hours) you kind of can't remember what life was like before you started the journey ~ hence entering Coach World. What I wanted was music that has something of that endless elongation vibe. Initially daunting, then meditative, then you don't want to leave and have to listen again.... 

Another aesthetic influence was the idea of Holiday Memory ~  a fleeting moment of a holiday situation (going around an art gallery for example), where you can remember with clarity (or what your brain thinks is clarity) a specific moment (the angle of the walls, how the lighting looked, spotlights on glass, colours maybe scents or what you were feeling) forever hightened in your mind in a specific way (because you are on holiday) but you have little or no memory of what preceded / succeeded that moment. So you end up with a loop of thought, or a series of loops as a memory of a holiday from 20, 30, 40+ years ago. Over time they might not all even be from the same holiday.... This concept was something that kept popping into my mind as I assembled the music, sort of 'bursts of heightened memory looping'. 

"Sonic Procedure wise, I was getting bored of limited melodic chord changes and wanted something that had a bit of distance from what my standard compositional impulses were. Essentially the majority of the music is comprised of micro-samples (like a snap blast of fuzzy background music on a VHS tape documentary c1982) that are then cleaned up a bit and subjected to endless processes (re-sampling is apparently the key word here). After doing this for several months I had a substantial wonky library of component tune elements that were then deployed in the guiding service of the Gruesome Shrewd package holiday aesthetic. 

What I found was that generally the tracks fell into 3 styles ~ 

a) Sludgy Psyche Rock 

b) 80s Corporate Corroded 

c) Ambient Slurry (naturally there was also a judicious application of disembodied voices). 

I suppose you could say this sort of sound world is Chopped + Screwed (which does sound a little like Gruesome Shrewd) but whereas (in my non-expert knowledge) C&S tends to have that nice thick syrupy sound + big bass + distortion, I'd say there's something different going on with GS/GE even though some of the production techniques would be fairly similar. It's sort of elongated chewing toffee bar mids rather than cough syrup mixture lows. 

Compositionally I wanted something that sounded different to the more DAW / Electronica aspects of some MWC stuff ~ 'here are the beats / here goes the bass / that melody works as a chorus / tighten up that bit / move the last bit to the beginning as it has a better hook' etc. When putting these tracks together, quite often I went against my instincts and instead of tightening things up, deliberately left things more loose and allowed elements to play out / loop for longer... 

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Coaches - specifically the rippled patterns of rain streaking down the windows of a coach in motion - is one of the mental images that often comes to mind when listening to the music of Lo Five. Another is the foreshortening effect on your visual range caused by light drizzle, a muffling of distance. Something about the grey-scale shimmer summons those mundane-mystical moments where boredom and bliss are so very close indeed.

There is a new Lo Five record -  Superdank, released on Lunar Module, a CD-oriented imprint of Castles in Space - and it pulls me into its paradoxically inertial motion as irresistibly as ever. Slipping Time's moorings again....

Release rationale: 

Lo Five is as proud as he is anxious to present SUPERDANK, a CD album packed to the green gills with heavy dubs for sleepy schlubs.

SUPERDANK is ostensibly presented as a collection of hardware stoner jams, structured in the form of an hour long edible-induced psycho-narrative, taking the listener on an aural voyage - kicking off at pleasant buzztown, calling past existential paranoiaville, then landing back in the relative safety of sofaborough in time for tea and crumpets.

But what is SUPERDANK? What does it mean?

If we were were inclined to illustrate the vibe, we'd say it's along the lines of:

• Forgetting you had an A-level exam because you were busy making the world's largest hash brown

• Having a panic attack in the shower because you couldn't gauge how hot the water was

• Claiming to have invented the story to The Matrix before watching The Matrix

• Using the pages of a bible for cigarette paper after running out of Rizlas

Is SUPERDANK a flimsy concept designed to package a bunch of disparate tracks we weren't sure wether to release or not? Or is it more of a subconscious collective fugue state, woven into the very fabric of our confused mental substrate? Maybe it's both? Who cares?

In either case draw the blinds, turn off your mobile and settle in for a trip you'll potentially regret forever, because it's time... for SUPERDANK...

Lunar Module is thrilled to present the latest album from Wirral based sonic alchemist Neil Grant, better known as Lo Five - a record that feels like it was beamed in from a parallel dimension where melody and madness hold hands.

In an era dominated by algorithmic predictability, Lo Five remains that rarest of artists: a producer whose music is unashamedly strange yet somehow impossibly tuneful. It's the sound of a Commodore 64 dreaming it's a jazz orchestra, or a broken music box trying to remember a rave from 1993 - familiar enough to hum along, alien enough to make the hairs on your neck stand up in delighted confusion.

Beyond the speakers, Neil Grant is a quietly heroic figure in the UK electronic underground. The time he pours into supporting fellow artists - organising events, mentoring newcomers, championing overlooked talent - make him as vital a community builder as he is an innovator in the studio.

This new Lo Five album is more than a collection of tracks; it's a reminder that electronic music can still surprise, unsettle, and seduce in equal measure. It's strange. It's tuneful. It's essential. 

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American exchange student Daniel Lopatin has a fab new album out, Tranquilizer. 

Over at Line Noise, though, Ben Cardew invokes conceptronica in trying to explain why's he not feeling this new Oneohtrix Point Never record. 

Although tickled by this idea that I danced myself right out the womb,  I have to do whatever the opposite of co-sign is here: partly because I don't generally find Dan's conceptual apparatus to be overbearing, it works more as a bonus supplement for the listener, but also because I loved Tranquilizer on first listen, as a simple flood of aural pleasure, no cerebration required. (I also don't think Oneohtrix has ever really been in the business of making people dance, so it seems an odd expectation).   The conceptual aspect seem to work primarily as a germinal spur for the artist. In this case, the procedure  involves sample CDs from the 1990s as a source that is then put through a series of processes - sounds connotative of luxury, relaxation, high-quality, are then tesselated in ways that are weirder and more abstract than their original intended function, but retain the aura of polish and professionalism

There seems to be a spectrum of ways artists in this approximate area operate. Some have a defined framing concept from the start (The Caretaker, or Debit), others work with a procedure or an idea of what the starter material is going to be (restriction, or focus, as the mother of invention). Some (Ghost Box for example) have a mood board, a constellation of musical and non-musical reference points and coordinates that give the project its consistency without overdetermining it. And then others still grope about in the formless dark, molding and grappling without any premeditated notion of where they are going, following intuition and instinct until a direction or shape emerges (I imagine this is how Autechre go about it). In the end, it doesn't really matter - the outcome is all that counts. 

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Up at the Insitute, there's been a flurry of archival activity.

Notably Jean-Michel Jarre's very vaporwave looking if not sounding experimental electronic album of 1972, Deserted Palace

And also collations of work by Bernie Parmegiani and by ex-wife Jean Schwarz 

The Bernie collection includes his marvelous music for this marvelous animation by Piotr Kamler, which almost singlehandedly propelled me into the (once fevered, now somewhat dormant) obsession with experimental animation as fitfully still expressed at the blog Dreams, Built By Hand and its attendant ever-growing playlist, which would take at least a week to watch through. You'll notice that "L'araignéléphant" - it translates as "The Spider Elephant" - is the first film at the top of that playlist. 

Another archival release of recent years, now itself reissued in spiffed up form, comes from our Irish affiliates the Miúin label:   Kilkenny Electroacoustic Lab Volume 1 now comes with a book and a poster. 

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The half-lives of hauntology continue - word reaches me of this book, out on Reaktion next summer. 

By my count, this is the fourth substantial book on the H-zone (not counting the A Year in the Country ever-growing seriess of volume, or the 'pastoral horror'  microgenre or  'scarred by 70s kids tell'-sploitation subset).

I suppose the first would be our dear lost boy's Ghosts of My Life. 

I had a very interesting and jolly chat with Adina Glickstein for the arts magazine Spike on the subject of nostalgia and retrokultur, touching on many topics including techbro futurism and the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. 

The whole Spike issue is themed around nostalgia and related subjects and well worth a peruse.

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I suppose it's nice to have done a book that enjoys a half-life or two... it is surprising how often I still get asked to comment on these sort of themes: retro-paralysis, cultural stagnation, hauntology... 

I don't mind, but in truth my mind has moved on to other preoccupations... mainly the ideas surrounding the new book, due out in June next year. 

Which as it happens has a completely different perspective on "the rhetorics of temporality"  than Retromania. 

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Keeping the retrochat going have been other writers with books that either extend the polemic or refute it.... 

In the first camp, there's W. David Marx with Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, for which I gave this blurb: 

"The first quarter of the 21st Century had a paradoxical feeling - so much happened and yet nothing happened at all. A triumph of forensic research and pattern recognition, Blank Space cuts through the bustle and the babble, makes a senseless time make sense. W. David Marx diagnoses the malaise and even proposes a course of treatment. This is a book that's fun to agree with and even more fun to argue with." 

Here is a fairly positive response to Marx's argument from Celine Nguyen at Asterisk and a far less friendly take from Emily Watlington at Artnews. Here's an extract at The Atlantic.

(The one thing I didn't get with Marx's book is why he titled it Blank Space, which to me seems like either a positive image - possibility, an open frontier - or a neutral one. As a trope of barrenness in re.  the first 25 years of the 21stC it doesn't quite compute for me).  

As regards the counter-argument, the Full Space perspective -  "these be years of plenty, innovations up the wazoo, you just need to  gouge loose the wax clogging up your ears, O geriatics" - there's the fairly recent book Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age by Liam Inscoe-Jones. 

Here is a wide-ranging discussion Inscoe-Jones had with Chal Ravens at Tribune a few months ago, and which has suddenly jumped out from behind the paywall. It's title is Has Pop Finally Eaten Itself?  (Variations on that trope certainly have eaten themselves by this point!)

The piece's url, I note wryly, includes the words "after-retromania". 

Would that we were! In both senses of the word -  the discourse, and the underlying phenomenon itself.

Clearly there's enough evidence - currently, but probably at most moments in the history of pop culture, apart from very obvious surge phases like mid-Sixties or punk/New Wave -  that could be marshalled to sustain either argument.  

There's always a ton of lame stuff around - revival, retread, remake, etc.

Equally, you can always point to people doing cool things in music - even during the years when I was writing Retromania, I never had any trouble coming up with a substantial end-of-year list of music I liked and thought was doing interesting things.  Inventive, if not quite innovative. 

The problem is more on the level of: what is the most that you can imagine happening with this cool / clever / inventive / conceivably even innovative  music? Is it going to break out all across the surfaces of everyday life? Shake things up? 

I would say "is it going to change the sound of the radio?" (thinking of Timbaland, or New Wave, or psychedelia - the instantiation of a new sonic template on a culture-wide basis). 

But radio isn't a thing anymore. Who listens to the radio?  

That is the big structural problem, which Ravens and Inscoe-Jones touch on in their dialogue. Monoculture still exists, but its mechanisms now - TikTok etc - agitate against anything lasting or substantial. 

In terms of "change the sound of the radio" - the last time that happened as far as I can tell is the Auto-Tune trap moment. (Which is the last moment I personally listened to the radio regularly). (And which was also my kind of "psychedelic rap" as opposed to the stuff Inscoe-Jones reps for - Danny Brown etc). 

But then again.... doesn't it all seem so trivial, as something to be concerned about, next to what's happening in this country, and in too many other places around the world - including the UK? Political retromania is the true nightmare.

Bevis Frond addresses the Anxiety of Influence in song -  appropriately using the most Oedipus Complex-obsessed, Norman O.Brown-stanning man in rock, Jim Morrison, although it's a different Jim who forever shadows his (re)creative efforts. 

"I took an album from the ancient unit

And I walked on down the hall

"Jimi, I want to kill you"

He stood before me in a vision

With treasured secrets of the blues

A voice rang out from battered speakers

 "You are not fit to shine my shoes".

Jeff Lynne, virtually a Bloomian archetype of the "weak rocker", here on "Beatles Forever" fesses up to his unrecoupable artistic debts. But  then chickened out and didn't release the track.  

Key couplet: 

I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care

I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs

Full lyric: 

Beatles forever

Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da

There's something about a Beatles song, that lives forevermore

The beauty of the harmonies, the sound of the Fab Four

All their music will live on and on (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)

They really taught the world to sing (She came in through the bathroom window)

Beatles forever, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"

Beatles forever, "All You Need Is Love", yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," wooh

Beatles forever, "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" (number nine)

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

I try to write a good song, a song with feel and care

I think it's quite a good song, 'til I hear one of theirs

Makes you wonder how they did it (John 'n' Paul, George and Ringo)

I wish I knew the secret, yeah yeah yeah (She came in through the bathroom window)

Beatles forever, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and ever

Beatles forever, "Nowhere Man" and "Penny Lane", yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"

Beatles forever, "Get Back" and "Yesterday"

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

All the children sing

Beatles forever, "Please Please Me", "Eleanor Rigby"

Beatles forever, "I Am The Walrus" (yeah yeah yeah) goo-goo g'joob

Beatles forever, "She Loves You", ooh, "Day Tripper"

Beatles forever, "Eight Days A Week", "Magical Mystery Tour"

'Cause when you feel the beat, you've gotta move your feet

You get the rhythm and blues, and a pretty tune

Rock and roll eternity, that started out as Merseybeat

Ah ah-ah-ah-ah, ah-ah ah-ah, ah-ah-all-ah

Ah, feel the beat, ah-ah-ah-ah, gotta move your feet ah-ah ah-ah

Rhythm and blues, ah-ah-ah-ah, pretty tune

Ah, rock and roll, ah-ah-ah-ah, eternity, ah-ah ah-ah

Started out, ah-ah ah-ah, as Merseybeat

Beatles forever

Beatles forever, yeah yeah yeah

Beatles forever

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962!  

This  BBC short film, titled "The Lonely Shore" and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance. 

Keeping it haunty, there's some nice and eerie Radiophonic Workshop and Henk Badings electronics on the score. 

And then there's grave and witheringly supercilious upper class voiceover - mordantly speculating about the spiritual emptiness that rotted out this culture from within, a loss of purpose, vitality, connection to Nature - which has the feeling of a classic Public Information film.

As for the text itself, there are suggestions that the author is familiar with Nietzsche (Uses and Abuses of History, the Last Man - "we can feel only pity for these last men and women", goes the "Lonely Shore" voiceover) and Oswald Spengler (patternwork, Decline of the West). 

There are even a few proto-Retromania touches, which again is pretty good going for 1962. 

The film's beachscape setting, with the Jetsam of Time - the  mystifying and opaque salvage - arrayed in orderly and symmetrical patterns, recalls the Easter Island statues, certain tableaux from Surrealist paintings, and the post-catastrophe vistas of J.G. Ballard eerie early short stories and novels.

I wonder also if whoever wrote it was a fan of Olaf Stapledon, specifically Last and First Men.

There's also a touch too of H.P. Lovecraft and At the Mountains of Madness. 

One of those finds that seem too good to be true somehow but it is via the BBC Archive.

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Informational lowdown from Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain:

"Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, filmed by Ken Russell and with commentary by Tony Church, this fabulous little film was one of 21 that Russell made for the fortnightly BBC arts programme 'Monitor' between 1959 and 1962.

"The entirely fascinating Hawkes - the first woman to read for the Archeology & Anthropology degree at the University of Cambridge, co-founder of CND, gay rights campaigner & wife of novelist J.B. Priestly - provides a text that is as cutting as it is blunt, that satirises both the language and assumptions of her own disciplines and the cosy absurdities and consumerist excesses of British life in the early 1960s. "  

Hawkes was an archaeologist, among other things, which fits the framing of "The Lonely Shore"

Wordsworth, from the Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads, written and published in 1800

The Seventeenth Century is barely over and here is William, complaining about what we would think of as the doomscroll or media overload: "the great national events which are daily taking place... a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies", stirred up in the hearts and nervous systems of those who live in cities.

"Hourly gratifies" - how often did broadsheets come out in those days? Perhaps he's talking about gossip, rumors... 

And then William's other complaints about degraded entertainments and hyperstimulation - "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse". He could be talking about TikTok and Reels, influencers and Love Island, videogames and franchise blockbusters. 

In the Prelude, he proposes Nature and pastoral life as the remedy, a soul-recentering restoration, a resetting of the overclocked sensibility.  Again, very much like wellness and meditation and silent retreats today

"An almost savage torpor" - I'd put that on a T-shirt. That is my existence, distilled. 

Interesting also to learn from the Prelude that Wordsworth - whose poetry today seems like proper fancy stuff - was in fact aiming to write in the language of the common man, plainspoken, earnest, stripped of all affectations, circumlocution, ornamentation and other flashy flourishes

   These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things. 

an excerpt from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798

I wonder if Wordsworth would have approved of this tribute? 

Busy bee

Buzzing all day long

What's the hurry?

There's surely something wrong

I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright

'Cause your friends are picking flowers

Take away all my light

But you see busy bee

It's all for love

People pick them

You lick them all for love

Lalalalala...

She was a virgin, of humble origin

She knew of no sin

Her eyes as bright as the stars without light

Spent all the night

 Someone asked me what I meant by this term….

"Hyperstasis" is a concept I came up with after listening to a bunch of new electronic dance albums that had been hyped by music journalists, and having this mixed response: being quite impressed by the intelligence and diversity of the music, while ultimately being dissatisfied because nothing on the record ever really felt to me like it was "totally new" or "the future". (Which is the sensation I got all the time from electronic dance music in the Nineties, that the music was hurtling into the future and mutating wildly into all kinds of unprecedented forms). Often I concluded that the artists had managed to avoid being indebted to a single source by being diversely derivative.

Hyperstasis is a paradox, similar to the idea of "running on the spot", or the hamster who cycles endlessly and frenetically on his wheel. The "hyper" element is the way that the music, across the whole of an album but sometimes also within any given track, shuttles back and forth across a kind of grid-space of influences and sources. It is recombinant without ever quite innovating. It moves at a great speed and with great fluency within terra cognita, the sonic territory of the already known. But it never quite manages to push into the unknown and take the listener "out there".

Hyperstasis is a condition that afflicts individual artists and pieces of music. But it is also a condition that can trap an entire genre or field of music. It is not such a terrible state of affairs: good records still come out, often a lot of them. Hyperstasis is not a state of entropy and inertia so much as a febrile stage that follows a period of earlier creativity, which generated a lot of material to be reworked and recombined.  But the suspicion is that the frenzy of hyperstasis is what precedes a final collapse.

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Although I have no recollection of taking it from somewhere or even seeing it before I started using it circa 2009-10… it seemed like a word that would have to have been invented for some other purpose. I did look it up once and seem to recall it had some very specific meaning in physics or maybe finance. 

It feels to me to have some vague kinship with stagflation, but there isn't a direct correlation or analogy - more that both words describe something oxymoronic, "shouldn't be happening", worst of both worlds syndrome.

~

Historians of retro concur that the first time "retro" was used in its current way was in France in the early '70s, with the phrase mode rétro - the retro style - to describe a spate of historical films about France during World War 2, which then sparked a 1940s fashion revival.

Here is an interview with Michel Foucault from July 1974 in which he caustically castigates the trend. It's from Cahiers du Cinema and it's titled ANTI-RETRO'  and Foucault's interlocutors are Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana. Translated by Annwyl Williams.  Disappointingly the word "retro" never passes the lips of MF himself. In truth, the discussion is not really about retro as we would understand the term - depthless and dehistoricized duplication of the past -  but about historical revisionism and popular memory.

CAHIERS: Let's take as our starting point the journalistic phenomenon of the 'retro style', One might simply ask: How is it that films like Lacomhe Lucien or The Night Porter are possible today? Why are they so immensely popular? We think there are three levels that ought to be taken into account. First, the political conjuncture. Giscard d'Estaing has been elected. A new type of relation to politics, to history, to the political apparatus is being created, one that indicates very clearly - and in a way that is plain to everyone - the death of Gaullism. We therefore have to see, in so far as Gaullism remains very closely associated with the period of the Resistance, how this manifests itself in the films that are being made. Second, how can bourgeois ideology be mounting an attack in the breaches of orthodox Marxism - call it rigid, economistic, mechanistic , whatever you like - which for a very long time has provided the only grid for interpreting social phenomena? Finally, where do militants fit into all this, since militants are consumers and sometimes producers of films?

What has happened since Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity is that the floodgates have opened. Something which until then had been completely suppressed, that is to say banned, is being openly voiced. Why?

​FOUCAULT: That can be explained, I think, by the fact that the history of the War and what happened before and after the War has never really been inscribed in anything other than wholly official histories. These official histories are basically centred on Gaullism which, on the one hand, Was the only way of writing that history in terms of an honourable nationalism and, on the other hand, was the only way of casting the Great Man, the man of the right and of outdated nineteenth-century nationalisms, in a historical role. 

It boils down to the fact that France was exonerated by de Gaulle, and on the other hand the right - and we all know how it behaved at the time of the War - found itself purified and sanctified by de Gaulle. Suddenly the right and France were reconciled in this way of making history: don't forget that nationalism was the climate in which nineteenth-century history (and especially its teaching) were born. 

What has never been described is what happened in the very depths of the country from 1936 on, and even from the end of the First World War to the Liberation. 

CAHIERS: So, what has perhaps been happening since The Sorrow and the Pity is that the truth is making its return into history. The question is whether it's really the truth. 

FOUCAULT: That has to be linked to the fact that the end of Gaullism has put a stop to this justification of the right by de Gaulle and the episode in question. The old Petainist right, the old collaborationist, Maurrasian and reactionary right which camouflaged itself as best it could behind de Gaulle, now considers itself entitled to produce a new version of its own history. This old right which, since Tardieu, had been disenfranchised historically and politically, is coming to the fore again.

It supported Giscard explicitly. It no longer needs to wear a mask, and so it can write its own history. And among the factors that explain Giscard's current acceptance by half the French (plus two hundred thousand), one mustn't forget films like those we're talking about - whatever the film-makers actually intended. The fact that all that has actually been shown has allowed the right to re-form along certain lines. In the same way that, inversely, it's the blurring of the distinctions between the nationalist right and the collaborationist right that has made these films possible. It's all part of the same thing. 

CAHIERS; This piece of history is therefore being rewritten both in the cinema and on television, with debates like those on Dossiers de I'ecran (which chose the theme of the French under the Occupation twice in two months). Film-makers considered to be more or less on the left are also apparently involved in this rewriting of history. That's something we have to investigate.

FOUCAULT: I don't think things are that simple. What I was saying a moment ago was very schematic. Let me continue.

There's a real battle going on. And what's at stake is what might be roughly called popular memory. It's absolutely true that ordinary people, I mean those who don't have the right to writing, the right to make books themselves, to compose their own history, these people nevertheless have a way of registering history, of remembering it, living it and using it. This popular history was, up to a point, more alive and even more clearly formulated in the nineteenth century when you had, for example, a whole tradition of struggles relived orally or in texts, songs, etc. 

But the fact is that a whole series of apparatuses has been established ('popular literature', cheap books, but also what is taught in school) to block this development of popular memory, and you could say that the project has been, relatively speaking, very successful. The historical knowledge that the working class has about itself is becoming less all the time. When you think, for example, about what the workers knew about their own history at the end of the nineteenth century, and what the tradition of trade unionism - using the term 'tradition' in its full sense - represented up until the First World War, it amounted to something pretty substantial. That has been gradually disappearing. It's disappearing all the time, although it hasn't actually been lost. 

Nowadays, cheap books are no longer enough. There are much more efficient channels in the form of television and cinema. And I think the whole effort has tended towards a recoding of popular memory which exists but has no way of formally expressing itself. People are shown not what they have been but what they must remember they have been. 

Since memory is an important factor in struggle (indeed, it's within a kind of conscious dynamic of history that struggles develop), if you hold people's memory, you hold their dynamism. And you also hold their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. You make sure that they no longer know what the Resistance was actually about ... 

It's along some such lines, I think, that these films have to be understood. What they're saying, roughly, is that there has been no popular struggle in the twentieth century. This statement has been formulated twice, in two different ways. The first time immediately after the War , when the message was a simple one: 'The twentieth century, what a century of heroes! Churchill, de Gaulle, all those parachute landings, airborne missions, etc.' Which was a way of saying: 'There was no popular struggle, that was the true struggle: But no one, as yet, has said directly: 'There Was no popular struggle.' 

The other, more recent way - sceptical or cynical, as you wish - consists in opting for statement pure and simple: 'Well, just look at what happened. Did you see any struggles? Can you see anyone rebelling, taking up arms?' 

CAHIERS: There's a kind of rumour that's been going round since, perhaps, The Sarrow and the Pity. Namely: the people of France, in the main, didn't resist, they even accepted collaboration, they accepted the Germans, they swallowed the lot. The question is what that really means. And it does indeed seem that what is at stake is the popular struggle, or rather people's memory of it.

FOUCAULT: Exactly. That memory has to be seized, governed, controlled, told what to remember. And when you see these films, you learn what to remember: 'Don't believe everything you were once told. There are no heroes. And if there are no heroes, that's because there's no Struggle.' Hence a kind of ambiguity: on the one hand, 'there are no heroes' positively debunks a whole mythology of the war hero in the Burt Lancaster mould. It's a way of saying: 'War isn't that at al1!' Hence an initial impression that historical untruths are being stripped away: finally we're going to be told why we don't all have to identify with de Gaulle or the members of the Normandy-Niemen mission, etc. But hidden beneath the phrase 'There were no heroes' is another phrase which is the real message-'There was no struggle': That's how the process works. 

CAHIERS: There's something else that explains why these films are successful. They make use of the resentment felt by those who did indeed struggle against those who did not. For example, in The Sorrow and the Pity people active in the Resistance see the citizens of a town in central France doing nothing, and recognize this response for what it is. It's their resentment that comes across more than anything; they forget that they struggled. 

FOUCAULT: What's politically important, to my mind, more than this or that film, is the the fact that there's a series - the network that's made up of all these films and the place they 'occupy' (no pun intended). In other words, what is important is the question: 'Is it possible, at the present time, to make a film that's positive about the struggles of the Resistance?' And of course you realize that it isn't. The impression you have is that people would find it a bit of a joke, or else, quite simply, that no one would go and see it.

​I quite like The Sorrow and the Pity. I don't think it was a bad thing to have done. Perhaps I'm wrong, that's not what matters. What matters is that this series of films corresponds exactly to the fact that it is now impossible - as each of the films emphasizes - to make a film about the positive struggles that may have taken place in France around the time of the War and the Resistance. 

CAHIERS: Yes. It's the first thing they say if you criticize a film like Malle's. 'What would you have done instead?' is always the reply. And of course we don't have an answer. The left should be beginning to have a point of view on this, but in fact it has yet to be properly worked out.

Then again, this raises the old problem of how to produce a positive hero, a new type of hero. 

FOUCAULT. The difficulties don't revolve around the hero so much as around the question of struggle. Can you make a film depicting a struggle without making the characters into heroes in the traditional sense? It's an old problem: how did history come to speak as it does and to recuperate the past, if not via a procedure which was that of the epic, that's to say, by telling its own story in the heroic mode? That's how the history of the French Revolution was written. The cinema proceeded in the same way. The strategy can always be ironically reversed: 'No, look, there are no heroes, we're all worthless, etc.'

CAHIERS: Let's come back to the 'retro style'. The bourgeoisie has been relatively successful from its own point of view in focusing attention on a historical period (the 1940s) which highlights both its strong and its weak points. For on the one hand that's where the bourgeoisie is most easily unmasked (it laid the ground for Nazism and collaboration), and on the other hand that's where today it tries to justify, in the most cynical way possible, its historical attitude. The problem is: how can we produce a positive account of this same historical period? We - that is, the generation that took part in the struggles of 1968 or Lip. Is this the point on which we should go in and fight, with the idea of possibly, in some way or another, taking the ideological lead? For it's true that the bourgeoisie is on the offensive as well as on the defensive on this question of its recenc history. On the defensive strategically, on the offensive tactically since it has found its strong point, the thing that enables it best co manipulate the facts. But ought we simply - defensively - co be re-establishing the historical truth? Ought we not to be finding the point which, ideologically, would take us into the breach? Is this automatically the Resistance? Why not 1789 or 1968? 

FOUCAULT: As far as these films are concerned, I wonder whether something else couldn't be done on the same topic. And by 'topic' I don't mean showing struggles or showing that there were none. What I'm thinking is that its historically true that among ordinary French people there was, at the time of the War, a kind of refusal of war. Now where did that come from? From a whole series of episodes that no one talks about, neither the right because it wishes to hide them, nor the left because it does not want to compromise itself with anything that goes against 'national honour'. 

During the First World War, after all, some seven or eight million lads were conscripted. For four years they had a terrible life, they saw millions and millions of people dying around them. Back home in 1920, what did they have to look forward co? A right-wing government, total economic exploitation and finally, in 1932, an economic crisis and unemployment. How could these men, who had been packed into the trenches, still be in favour of war during the decades 1920-30 and 1930-40? In the case of the Germans, defeat rekindled their nationalist instincts, so that this distaste for war was overcome by the desire for revenge. But when all is said and done, people don't like fighting bourgeois wars, with the officers involved, for the gains involved. I believe that was an important phenom_ enon in the working class. And when, in 1940, you have men driving their bikes into a ditch and saying, 'I'm going home', you can't just say, 'What a bunch of cowards' and you can't hide it either. It has co be seen as part of the whole sequence. This disobeying of national orders has to be traced back to its roots. And what happened during the Resistance is the opposite of what we are shown: that's to say that the process of repoliticization, remobilization, the taste for struggle was gradually revived in the working class. It slowly began to revive after the rise of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War. What the films show is the reverse process: after the great dream of 1939, which was shattered in 1940, people just give up. This process did indeed take place, but within another much longer process which was moving in the opposite direction and which, beginning with the distaste for war, ended in the middle of the Occupation with the realization that there had to be a struggle. As for the theme 'There are no heroes, everyone's a coward', you have to ask yourself where it comes from and what it grows out of. After all, have there ever been any films about mutiny? 

CAHlERS: Yes. There was Kubrick's film (Paths of Glory), which was banned in France.

FOUCAULT: I believe that this disobedience in the context of national armed struggles had a positive political meaning. The historical theme of Lacombe Lucien's family could be picked up again if taken back to Ypres and Douaumont ...

CAHIERS: Which poses the problem of popular memory, of its own particular sense of time, which doesn't correspond at all to the timing of events like changes of government or declarations of war ... 

​FOUCAULT: The aim of school history has always been to show how people got killed and how very heroic they were. Look what they did to Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars ... 

​CAHIERS: A certain number of films , Malle's and Cavani's included, tend to abandon any attempt to deal with Nazism and fascism historically or in terms of the struggle they provoked. Instead of this, or as well as this, they hold another discourse, usually a sexual one. What do you make of this other discourse? 

FOUCAULT: But isn't it quite different in Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter? Personally, I think that in Lacombe Lucien the erotic, passionate aspect has a function that's fairly easy to pinpoint. It's basically a way of reconciling the anti-hero, of saying that he's not as anti-heroic as all that. If all power relationships are indeed distorted by him, and if he renders them ineffective, by contrast, just when you think that for him all erotic relationships are similarly warped, a true relationship is discovered and he loves the girl. On the one hand there is the machinery of power which leads Lucien more and more, from the puncture onwards, towards a kind of madness. And on the other hand there is the machinery of love which seems to be following the same pattern, which seems to be distorted and which, on the contrary, works in the opposite direction and re-establishes Lucien at the end as the beautiful naked boy living in the fields with a girl. 

And so there's a kind of fairly facile antithesis between power and love. Whereas in The Night Porter the problem is - in general as in the present conjuncture - a very important one: it's that of the love of power. 

Power has an erotic charge. And this brings us to a historical problem: how is it that Nazism, whose representatives were pitiful, pathetic, puritanical figures, Victorian spinsters with (at best) secret vices, how is it that it can have become, nowadays and everywhere, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature the world over, the absolute reference of eroticism? A whole sleazy erotic imaginary is now placed under the sign of Nazism. Which basically poses a serious problem: how can power be desirable? No one finds power desirable any more. This kind of affective, erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, the power of a ruler, no longer exists. The monarchy and its rituals were made to evoke this kind of erotic relation to power. The great apparatuses of ​Stalin, and even of Hider, were also created for that purpose. But this has all disintegrated and it's clear that one cannot love Brezhnev or Pompidou or Nixon. It was perhaps possible, at a pinch, to love de Gaulle or Kennedy or Churchill. But what's happening now? Are we not seeing the beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, developed at one derisory, pathetic extreme by the sex shops with Nazi emblems that you find in the United States, and (in a much more tolerable but equally derisory version) in Giscard d'Estaing's attitude when he says, 'We'll march along the streets in suits shaking people's hands, and the kids will have a half-day holiday.' There's no doubt that Giscard fought part of his electoral campaign not just on his physical presence but also on a certain eroticization of his personal self, his elegance. 

CAHIERS: That's how he projected himself in an election poster, the one where his daughter is facing him. 

FOUCAUlT: That's right. He is looking at France but she is looking at him. Power becomes seductive once again.

CAHIERS: That's something that struck us during the election campaign, especially in the big television debate between Mitterrand and Giscard; they were on quite different territory. Mitterrand seemed like a politician of the old school, belonging to an old-fashioned left. He was trying to sell ideas, themselves dated and slightly quaint, and he did so with great dignity. Giscard on the other hand was selling the idea of power as if he were marketing a cheese. 

FOUCAULT: Even quite recently, you had to apologize for being in power. Power had to be erased and not show itself as such. That was, up to a point, how democratic republics functioned: the problem was to render power sufficiently insidious and invisible so that it became impossible to get a hold on what it did or where it was.

Nowadays (and in this de Gaulle played a very important role), power is no longer hidden, it is proud to be there and actually says: 'Love me , because I am power.'

​CAHIERS: Perhaps we should speak about the fact that Marxist discourse, as it has been functioning for some time, is somehow unable satisfactorily to account for fascism. Historically speaking, Marxism has accounted for the Nazi phenomenon in an economistic, determinist way, completely ignor ing what was specific to the ideology of Nazism. You can't help wondering how someone like Malle, well enough in touch with developments on the left, can play on this weakness, fall into this gap. 

FOUCAULT: Marxism defined nazism and fascism as 'the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary fraction of the bourgeoisie'. This is a definition completely lacking in content, and one which lacks a whole series of articulations. What is missing in particular is the fact that Nazism and fascism were made possible only by the existence within the general population of a relatively large fraction willing to take on and be responsible  for a certain number of state functions: repression, control, law and order. That, I think, is an important aspect of Nazism. The fact that it penetrated the general population so deeply and that some power was effectively delegated to certain people on the margins. That's where the word 'dictatorship' is both generally true and relatively false. When you think of the power an individual could possess under a Nazi regime from the moment he joined the SS or became a Party member! He could actually kill his neighbour, appropriate his wife and his house! That's where Lacombe Lucien is interesting, because it shows that side well. The fact is that, contrary to what one usually understands by dictatorship, that's to say the power of one individual, in a regime like that the most detestable, but in a sense the most intoxicating, part of power was given to a large number of people. It was the SS man who had the power to kill and to rape ... 

CAHIERS: That's where orthodox Marxism breaks down. Because this implies that there has to be a discourse on desire. 

​FOUCAULT: On desire and on power ... 

CAHIERS: That's also where films like Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter are relatively 'strong'. They can handle a discourse on desire and power in a way that seems coherent. 

FOUCAULT: In The Night Porter it's interesting to see how, in Nazism, the power of one man was taken up by many people and put to work. That sort of mock tribunal they set up is fascinating. Because from one angle it begins to look like a psychotherapy group, but in fact its power structure is that of a secret society. It's basically an SS cell that has re-formed, that gives itself legal powers different from and in opposition to the power at the centre. We have to remember how power was dispersed, how it was invested within the population itself, we have to remember this impressive displacement of power that Nazism brought about in a society like German society. It is untrue to say that Nazism was the power of the big industrialists continued in another form. It wasn't the power of the top brass reinforced. It was that too, but only on a certain level. 

CAHIERS: Indeed, that's an interesting aspect of the film. But what seemed very questionable to us was that it seemed to be saying: 'If you're a typical SS man, that's how you behave. But if on top of that you have a certain "notion of expenditure", that's the formula for a great erotic adventure.' So the film never abandons the idea of seduction. 

FOUCAULT: Yes, it's like Lacombe Lucien in that respect. For Nazism never gave anyone a pound of butter, it never gave anything but power. You have to ask yourself, if this regime was nothing other than a bloody dictatorship, how on 3 May 1945 there were still Germans fighting on to the last drop of blood, if these people were not attached to power in some way. Of course, you have to take into account all the pressures, denunciations ...

CAHIERS: But if there were denunciations and pressures, there must have been ​people to do the denouncing. How did people get caught up in it all? How were they ever conned by this redistribution of power in their favour?

FOUCAULT: In Lacomhe Lucien, as in The Night Porter, this excessive power that is given to them is converted back into love. It's very clear at the end of The Night Porter, with the recreation around Max, in his room, of a kind of concentration camp in miniature, where he is dying of hunger. There love has converted power, super-power, into total powerlessness. Roughly the same reconciliation occurs, in a sense, in Lacomhe Lucien, where love takes the excess of power by which it has been trapped and converts it inca a rural nakedness miles away from the Gestapo's shady hotel, miles away also from the farm where the pigs are being killed. 

CAHIERS: Are we then perhaps beginning to explain the problem you were posing earlier: how is it that Nazism, which was a puritanical, repressive system, is now universally eroticized? Some kind of displacement takes place: a problem which is central and which people don't wish to confront, the problem of power, is bypassed or rather completely displaced towards the sexual. So that this eroticization is really a displacement, a form of repression ... 

FOUCAULT: The problem is indeed a very difficult one and it has not perhaps been sufficiently studied, even by Reich. How is it that power is desirable and is actually desired? The procedures through which this eroticization is transmitted, reinforced, and so on, are clear enough. But for it to happen in the first place, the attachment co power, the acceptance of power by those over whom it is exercised, must already be erotic. 

CAHIERS: What makes it all the more difficult is that the representation of power is rarely erotic. De Gaulle and Hitler weren't exactly attractive. 

FOUCAULT: That's right, and I wonder whether in Marxist analyses one doesn't sacrifice a little too much to the abstract character of the idea of freedom. In a regime like the Nazi regime, it's quite clear that there's no freedom. But not having freedom doesn't mean that you don't have power. 

CAHIERS: It's on the level of the cinema and television, television being entirely controlled by power, that historical discourse has the greatest impact. Which implies a political responsibility. It seems to us that people are increasingly aware of it. For some years now, in the cinema, there has been more and more talk of history, politics, struggle ... 

FOUCAULT: There's a battle going on for history, around the history that's now in the making, and it is very interesting. People want to codify, to stifle What I have called 'popular memory', and also to propose, to impose a grid for interpreting the present. Until 1968 popular struggles had to do with folk tradition. For some they had no connection at all with anything going on in the present. After 1968 all popular struggles, whether in South America or in Africa, find an echo, a resonance. No longer can this separation, this sore of geographical cordon sanitaire, be established. Popular struggles have become not something that is happening now, but something that might always happen, in our system. And so they have to be set at a distance once again. How? Not by interpreting them directly - you would only lay yourself open to all the contradictions - but by proposing a historical interpretation of popular struggles from our own past, to show that in fact they never took place! Before 1968, it was: 'It won't happen, because it only happens elsewhere'; now it's: 'It won't happen, because it has never happened! Even something like the Resistance, the stuff of so many dreams, just look at it ... Nothing there. An empty shell, completely hollow!' Which is another way of saying: 'In Chile, don't worry, the peasants don't give a damn. In France too: a few troublemakers and their antics won't affect anything fundamental.' 

CAHIERS: For us, the important thing when one reacts to that, against that, is to realize that it's not enough to re-establish the truth, to say, about the Maquis for example, 'No, I was there, it didn't happen like that at all!' We believe that to conduct the ideological struggle effectively on the kind of terrain that these films lead into you have to have a wider, more comprehensive system of references - of positive references. For many people, for example, that consists in reappropriating the 'history of France'. It was against this background that we spent some time on Moi, Pierre Riviere . .. because we realized that in the end, and paradoxically, it helped us to explain Lacombe Lucien, that the comparison brought out a number of things. For example, one significant difference is that Pierre Riviere is a man who writes, who commits a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory. Malle's hero, on the other hand, is presented as a halfwit, as someone who goes through everything, history, the War, collaboration, without building on his experiences. And it's there that the theme of memory, of popular memory, can help us to make the distinction between someone, Pierre Riviere, who uses a language that is not his and is forced to kill to obtain the right to do so, and the character created by Malle and Modiano 8 who proves, precisely by not building on anything that happens to him, that there is nothing worth remembering. It's a pity you haven't seen The Courage of the People. It's a Bolivian film, which was made for the speClfic purpose of providing an exhibit for a dossier. This film, which can be seen everywhere except in Bolivia, because of the regime, is played by those who actually took part in the real-life drama it recreates (a miners' strike and its bloody repression) - they undertake to represent themselves so that no one will forget. 

It's interesting to see that, on a minimum level, every film is a potential archive and that, in the context of a struggle, one can take this idea one step further: people put together a film intending it to be an exhibit. And you can analyse that in two radically different ways: either the film is about power or it represents the victims of that power, the exploited classes who, without the help of the cinematographic apparatus, with very ​little knowledge of how films are made and distributed, take on their own representation, give evidence for history. Rather as Pierre Riviere gave evidence, that's to say, began to write, knowing that sooner or later he would appear before a court and that everyone had to understand what he had to say. 

What's important in The Courage of the People is that the demand actually came from the people. It was through a survey that the director first learned of the demand, and it was those who had lived through the event who asked for it to be memorized. 

​FOUCAULT: The people create their own archives. 

CAHIERS: The difference between Pierre Riviere and Lacombe Lucien is that Pierre Riviere does everything to enable us to discuss his history after his death. Whereas, even if Lacombe is a real character or one who might have existed, he is only ever the object of another's discourse. for purposes that are not his own. 

There are two things that are successful in the cinema now. On the one hand, historical documents, which have an important role to play. In Toute une vie, for example, they are very important. Or in films by Marcel Ophuls or Harris and Sedouy, when you see Duclos waving his arms about in 1936 and in 1939, these scenes from real life are moving. And on the other hand, fictional characters who, at a given moment in history, compress social relations, historical relations, into the smallest possible space. That's why Lacombe Lucien works so well. Lacombe is a Frenchman under the Occupation, someone very ordinary who stands in a concrete relationship to Nazism, to the countryside, to local government, etc. We have to be aware of this way of personifying history, of bringing it to life in a character, or a group of characters who, at a given moment, stand in a privileged relationship to power. 

There are lots of characters in the history of the workers' movement whom we don't know about: lots of heroes in the history of the working class who have been totally repressed. And I believe that something important is at stake here. Marxism doesn't need to make any more films about Lenin, there are more than enough already. 

FOUCAULT: What you are saying is important. It's a characteristic of many Marxists today. They don't know very much about history. They spend their time saying that history is being overlooked, but are only capable themselves of commenting on texts: 'What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that?' But that is Marxism if not another way of analysing history itself? In my opinion, the left, France, is not very interested in history. It used to be. In the nineteenth century you could say that Michelet represented the left at a given moment. There was also Jaures, and then a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez etc.). Today that has virtually dried up. Whereas it could be an impressi"e movement of writers and film-makers. There was of course Aragon and Les ​Cloches de Bale, ​which is a very great historical novel. But it doesn't amount to much, if you think of what that could represent in a society whose intellectuals are, after all, more or less steeped in Marxism. 

CAHIERS: Film-making brings in something new again in this respect: 'live' history ... What relation do American people have to history, now that they see the Vietnam War every evening on television as they eat their supper? 

FOUCAULT: As soon as you begin to see images of war every evening, war becomes utterly accepted. In other words, extremely boring - you would certainly prefer to watch something else. But once it becomes boring, it's accepted. You don't even watch it. So what do you have to do for this news, as it appears on film, to be reactivated as news that is historically important? 

CAHIERS: Have you seen Les Camisards?

​FOUCAULT: Yes, I liked it a lot. Historically it's beyond reproach. It's a beautiful film, it's intelligent, it explains so much.

CAHIERS: I think that's the direction film-makers should be taking. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning, another problem that must be mentioned is the confused response of the far left to certain aspects of Lacombe Lucien and The Night Porter, the sexual aspect especially. How might the right take advantage of this confusion? 

FOUCAULT: On this subject of what you call the far left, I don't really know what to think. I'm not even sure whether it still exists. All the same, a huge balance sheet has to be drawn up for the activities of the far left since 1968: the conclusions are negative on the one side and positive on the other. It's true that the far left has been responsible for a whole lot of important ideas in a number of areas: sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, housing, medicine. It has also been responsible for the diffusion of modes of action-which continues to be important. The far left has been important in the kinds of action it has taken as well as in the themes it has pursued. But there is also a negative balance in terms of certain Stalinist, terrorist, organizational practices. And there is equally a misapprehension of certain currents running wide and deep which have just resulted in thirteen million votes for Mitterrand, and which have always been neglected on the pretext that that was just politicking, party politics. Any number of aspects have been neglected, notably the fact that the desire to defeat the right has for some years, some months, been a very important political factor among the masses. The far left didn't have this desire because its definition of the masses was wrong and because it didn't really understand what it means to want to win. To avoid the risk of having victory snatched away it prefers not to run the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be recuperated. Personally, I'm not so sure.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Interesting that Asterix the Gaul, comic strip about plucky native resistance to Roman imperialism,  started the very year that Charles de Gaulle, hero of the Resistance, launches the Fifth Republic...

Mind you, other people have diagnosed it as being an allegory of American cultural imperialism, or even the Algerian war of independence... 

"It may be that Britain - and much of Europe - is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don't yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.

And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia - music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad."

Adam Curtis talking about his new-ish program Shifty

"You have this constant pantomime of hysteria which screws with your idea of time and yet it's almost like you're treading water. Nothing is actually happening. No one actually comes up with anything new. There are now four films being made about The Beatles. Four major movies about The Beatles. That's like people in the 1960s listening to a musical from the time of Queen Victoria. It's extraordinary! We're trapped!" 

 "Taylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day figure. That's not to diss any of what she's saying but it's quite held together in time and I don't think that expresses now."

"What you're left with now is this weird psychodrama-scape of everyone knowing that everyone is performing. The real self has completely disappeared deep within your and my minds and you'll never find it."

Adam Curtis also talking up and around his new-ish program Shifty

Martin Ingle oblivious to the irony of banging on about an already banged-to-bits critique

"regurgitating a past that never existed" - apart from that being a contradiction in terms (if it never existed, it could never be consumed in the first place, let alone puked up again for the re-eating), if that is actually what is going on, then it would be quite an interesting state of affairs. Unprecedented, even!

The Dutch duo of Robin Koek and Nick Lapien, known together as Artefakt, have long been shaping their own atmospheric corner of techno. Bridging the meticulousness of academic sound design with an ever-present emotive pulse, their work has resonated deeply across releases for labels such as Delsin, Semantica, Field Records, and their own De Stijl imprint.

They've always struck a balance between abstraction and function, a rare knack for making club-appropriate music that still rewards deeper, solitary listening. That tension surfaced memorably in tracks like "The Fifth Planet" or "Somatic Dreams," but perhaps most personally, in "Entering The City", a track that found its way into my Reflection on 2017 mix and still holds that special late-night gravity for me, many years on.

Their contribution to the isolatedmix series lands as an expansive meditation on contrast and communion. As the duo describe it:

"This recording came together for us imagining being in spaces of sonic isolation - conversing with each other and through this act of exchange, unfolding a dynamic landscape. This emerges as an auditory refuge where we become the waves. As we navigate this appearing structure, we re-anchor ourselves as listeners, embracing the ephemeral and reconciling with strangeness to find solace in deviation.

The mix also draws from a lifelong inspiration that runs as a thread through our own music - the contrasts between natural textures, organic decay and fractal blooming sounds set against the quantization, designed function and electric qualities of the built city and the futures they represent, captured in musical imagination. The mix invites listeners to dwell in this synthesis of spaces, discovering connection within isolation."

This is Artefakt working in longform and dictating progression, where subtle shifts feel tectonic and sequences unravel like a conversation across timezones. There's techno here, but blurred through the lens of wide-angle composition - a unique trance-like state that mimics their unique dance-floor rituals.

Download

Listen on Soundcloud, the ASIP Podcast or the 9128.live iOS and Android app.
~

Artefakt Bandcamp | Soundcloud | Instagram

Somewhere between tape hiss and transmission error, Pentagrams Of Discordia have been quietly assembling fragments of forgotten broadcasts, reel-to-reel experiments, and dusty rhythm boxes into something that might resemble a memory.

The elusive trio work collectively, in analog shadows, and their fingerprints are embedded deep within this mix. Much of the material you'll hear is unreleased- looped, spliced, and sequenced exclusively for this set. It's both a showcase of their sound, and an enigma; a nodding towards certain iconic duos and chill-room auteurs without ever tipping fully into homage.

Their isolatedmix is the kind of journey that begins with no particular destination, meandering across shortwave frequencies, roadside daydreams, and the occasional flickering motel sign. A collage of found melodies, distorted lullabies, and cracked-lens nostalgia - less a DJ set and more a shared hallucination.

"Expect unreleased gems, spectral edits, and glitchy whispers from forgotten projects: each track chosen not just for sound, but for how it haunts. A guided descent into the vaults, stitched with care, mischief, and just enough distortion" - PoD.

Download

Listen on Soundcloud, the ASIP Podcast or the 9128.live iOS and Android app.

After following their lush analog output via Ghostly International in recent years, I couldn't be more excited to present an album by KILN here on ASIP. By way of an entry point to anyone new to the trio of Hayes, Marrison & Rehberg, think more electronic worlds of Christian Kleine, Bitstream, Freescha, ISAN et al, all captured as live performances, combined with micro-field recordings and further saturated with color and texture…

A big thank you to Sam Valenti IV for connecting our two worlds.

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KILN return with an opulent new display of hue and swing on Lemon Borealis, a sumptuous gallery of dazzling motifs that display a finely hewn concoction of visual tones and vital pulse.

Across its 12 cuts, this collection utilizes a fresh process of condensing immersive sprawl into compact, punchy and colorful sound. Using aspects of live performance, beatmaking and waveform sculpting, the troika of Kevin Hayes, Kirk Marrison and Clark Rehberg III create evocative and invigorating dioramas, continuing to surprise and enchant listeners after over thirty years into their collaboration.

Deep in waves of Hi-meets-Lo Fi, KILN delivers a panchromatic daymark arranged to biochemically align and stimulate your personal syntax, forging a tapestry of sonic reveries ranging from the aquarium-on-fire radiance of DrnkGrlfrnd, a garden groove of field-recorded percussion in Maplefunk Diptych, to the sizzling guit-noise whiteout of Deacon Rayhand.

Their eighth album, and first for A Strangely Isolated Place, on Lemon Borealis, KILN expands upon the long-explored themes of mosaic texture, subtle melancholy, eroded consonance, and vivid cadence to reveal yet another aperture to their unique magnetic universe.

Lemon Borealis is available on 12" Transparent Yellow Smoke vinyl and digital on July 18th. Mastered and cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich, and featuring artwork by KILN.

See the album release page for full details to buy

Matt Xavier has been a friend of mine for many years now. A fellow music obsessive and trusted voice when it comes to all things ambient, techno, and beyond, we finally managed to meet in person while I lived in Los Angeles, and we stayed connected over music ever since.

We've swapped stories about pressing vinyl and running labels, and he was the reason I first crossed paths with Joel Mull (Damm) at one of his gatherings held at a beautiful Topanga home. It was a serendipitous moment that still echoes today.

A proponent for the deeper layers found in music, Matt has since become a practician, ambassador and pioneer for psychedelic soundtracking. Along the way, Matt would share tracks from ASIP and other labels that were impacting and guiding his private sessions, and informing his grand masterpiece we present to you today. After moving away from California, he dove head-first into his practice, and we exchanged many texts discussing his ambition to publish a book about his unique experience and include an accompanying mix on ASIP.

His new book, 'The Psychedelic DJ: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Music Curation and Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy', is a groundbreaking manual for anyone looking to bridge sound and healing. Whether you're a clinician, a DJ, or just someone who knows the power of a well-placed track, Matt's work will likely reframe how you think about music's role in inner journeys.

His isolatedmix is a fully formed and accompanying 'Protocol', which is an example of one of his many guided sessions, referred to as "therapeutic DJing." Psilocybin Therapy Protocol v1.22a, distills his craft and evolution in this practice for us all to dip into at a surface level, providing a peek into what are very personal worlds prepared for his clients.

Alongside the mix, Matt joins us for a deep-dive interview, discussing his new book, his transition from rave culture to guided sessions, his real-time curatorial method and how music, when chosen with care, can become a tool for transformation.

Listen on Soundcloud, the ASIP Podcast or the 9128.live iOS and Android app.

HQ Download (4gb)

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Tracklist | Bandcamp Playlist to support the featured artists

1. Jon Hopkins - 1/1 Singing Bowl (Ascension)
2. Marconi Union - Weightless Part 1
3. Neel, Voices From The Lake - Planatia
4. Helios - Penumbra
5. 36 & awakened souls - Take Me By The Hand (awakened souls - Acid Dream Version)
6. poemme - awning ~ under the willow tree
7. zakè (扎克) - 000607053 OTS3 [Solar]
8. awakened souls & From Overseas - Migration
9. awakened souls & From Overseas - Certainty Of Tides
10. 36 & awakened souls - Passing Dreams
11. Desert Dwellers - Lotus Garden Spaces
12. Disneynature Soundscapes - Jellyfish Atmosphere (BATHROOM BREAK)
13. Endless Melancholy - When I'm With You
14. Archivist - Photosensitive
15. Jens Buchert - Milano
16. Endless Melancholy & Black Swan - Forever In A Moment
17. Gelka - Ambient Impressions Vol 2 Mashup feat. FredAgain/NilsFrahm/Fejká
18. Lav - Collaborative Survival
19. Unknown - SMD_60_Bb_Oceanic_FX_Long_Surf EDITED
20. Lisa Bella Donna - Crystal Mountains (Matt Xavier EDIT)
21. Alucidnation - Skygazer
22. Wagogo Treeboga - Dream on
23. Poemme (Ed Harrison) - Out (Poemme remix)
24. John Beltran - Lose You
25. John Beltran - I Can Chase You Forever
26. Bluetech - Resonating Heart
27. Chicane - Early
28. Synkro - Midnight Sun (Helios remix)
29. Synkro - Movement
30. Carbon Based Lifeforms - Clouds
31. LF58 - Evocazione/Contatto/Risveglio
32. Tylepathy & Liquid Bloom - Interbeing (Tylepathy Remix)
33. Federico Durand - El pequeño zorro colorado
34. alucidnation - All at Sea
35. Slow Meadow - Upstream Dream
36. Endless Melancholy - Expand
37. Orbital - Belfast (ANNA Ambient Remix)
38. Slow Meadow - Fake Magic Is Real
39. Helios - Halving The Compass (Rhian Sheehan Remix)
40. Lusine Icl - Stones throw
41. Slow Meadow - Pareidolia
42. Jon Hopkins - Immunity

~

Interview with Matt Xavier, Integrated Psychedelics
Author of The Psychedelic DJ: A Practical Guide to Therapeutic Music Curation and Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy [Buy Paperback] [Buy hardcover]

ASIP: You come from a place of passion, DJing, and running labels. What impacted or influenced the shift into the psychedelic space with music?

Matt: I've been passionate about pairing music with life since I was very young, but I especially remember the very first time I ever stepped onto a dancefloor in 1993 at NASA, the legendary rave club in downtown New York City. From that point on, I knew I just had to be involved. I started throwing raves, and eventually became a psychedelic DJ during what I still believe was the most influential time in dance music history. The 90s were a hedonistic blast, especially our groundbreaking psychedelic trance events at the Shelter, but such debauchery also came with some downsides.

I ended up burning out at the turn of the millennium and went sober from 2000 to 2003. That time helped me fall back in love with myself, but I also fell out of love with New York. I moved to LA to be near my friends in Moontribe, who I'd gotten close with in the late 90s. That chapter in LA led to years of nightclub events, DJ sets, and running our techno label, Railyard Recordings. They were wildly fun times, but honestly, LA's backstage rat race wore me out. Financially, it didn't really hold up either, so I knew I had to make a change and find something that could carry me, and possibly a family, into the next chapters of my life.

In 2009, I decided to go back to school to become a counselor. I'd had a ton of personal experience with therapy by then, mostly from working through childhood trauma and recreational or problematic drug use during my teenage years. I worked full time as an addiction counselor during the oxycontin and heroin epidemic of the 2010s, and by 2015 the burnout was getting hard to manage. That's when I decided to revisit psychedelics but this time intentionally, and with a more therapeutic approach.

A few years later, the burnout finally caught up with me. I reached out to a friend who was a therapist working on the MDMA studies at a local university, and they pointed me toward the growing psychedelic integration community. The first time I walked into that space, it felt like home. Not just because it reminded me of my work as a group therapist, but also because of my deep history with psychedelics from the 90s rave and psy-trance scenes. It was a perfect match.

I immediately started seeking training and built out a private practice focused on integration work. That quickly evolved into guiding with psychedelics and music. And at some point, my wife pointed out that I hadn't actually quit DJing like I thought I had back in 2017. I was just doing it differently. I wasn't playing to or seeking crowds anymore. I was DJing for one person at a time, what I've always called an "audience of one." And the sets I've played in that context have, in many ways, offered more meaning and healing than anything I ever experienced on a dancefloor.

Caught catching up in the garden with Matt's new book

ASIP: I'm aware this type of practice can come across as very "hippy-dippy shit", but you approach it through a serious music background. Can you explain, for anyone new to this how your approach differs from the stereotypical approach?

Matt: Oh wow, I totally get that. It's understandable. Psychedelics still get looked at through the lens of "hippy-dippy shit," especially because of everything that happened in the 60s and 70s, and how effectively the government programmed society to see psychedelics as ridiculous or unserious. And to be fair, some of that reputation was well earned, and that goes for the ridiculous fashion and antics of ecstasy-rolling ravers of the 90s too.

The way psychedelics were presented during both counterculture movements didn't exactly help make them look medicinal or appealing to the average person. Hopefully the intentional, therapeutic, research-based approaches being taken these days are starting to change that narrative across the board.

As for the stereotypical approach... I'm honestly not even sure what that means anymore, because my colleagues and I all work in such different ways, sometimes radically different. But if we're talking about my approach, and what I lay out in the book, I'd say it's more intentional, more clinical, and more therapeutic, with aspects of spirituality mixed in. It's not recreational, though there's nothing wrong with recreating oneself, and it's definitely not counterculture or political.

The focus of my practice is helping clients safely explore psychedelics to address whatever they're working through when they arrive. That means looking at both conscious and unconscious drives, in a space that's safe and clinically informed. I do a full screening and assessment before we begin to make sure someone's a good fit. Then we do two or three 90-minute prep counseling sessions, and eventually a full journey day, which usually includes a nine-hour arc with a four-hour live DJ set to support their experience.

It's a serious, detailed, and thorough process that also leaves space for enjoyment, if that's what the client needs.

ASIP: As you mentioned, you're approaching it differently from a lot of other psychedelic guides. You're actively DJ'ing, curating music live during these journeys. Can you talk about your process more?

Matt: Yeah, one of the things I kept seeing in this field were guides who would just pull playlists off Spotify and hit play, hoping the client would be okay with it... and then being shocked when neither the client nor the guide were satisfied. I was never interested or willing to take that chance. And thanks to my background as a DJ, I didn't have to.

That's where I started developing something I now call Therapeutic Music Curation. It's a practice where music is treated like medicine, just like any other consciousness-altering substance. I think of each track as a sonic compound. I collect them, listen to them in different states, get to know their traits, and figure out how they might support a particular client's intention.

Then I build a rough arc based on what we've uncovered during screening and preparation, and align the music to the qualities of the first four stages of the psilocybin experience — the hike, the climb, the summit, and the descent. It's kind of like an internal therapeutic mountain-climbing expedition, with mushrooms and music doing their magic..

If you want to compare it to DJing, it's a lot like prepping your record box before you head to the club. You have a general idea of what might work based on the space, the sound system, the time slot, and the vibe. But as any DJ knows, once you walk in and feel the room, all your plans can go out the window. That's where the magic, and the real skill, comes in.

That moment of adaptation is what I call Psychedelic Soundtracking, the real-time adjustment of the "set" based on what's actually happening in the room, emotionally and energetically. I'm watching how the client is presenting. Are they crying? Laughing? Silent? Restless? I'm also tracking my own reactions in the field, and using all that information to shape both the sound and the music in response. That's the head and the heart of it.

Therapeutic Music Curation is the prep. Psychedelic Soundtracking is the execution. And together, that's what I call Therapeutic DJing, the intentional use of music before, during, and after the session to support the client's inner process and healing.

ASIP: What does the onboarding process you mention look like?

Matt: Psychedelics are incredibly powerful tools that should be used safely and wisely, preferably by trained professionals, shamans, or experienced psychonauts. To prevent unwanted harm, it's essential to screen all prospective clients before welcoming them into my practice. That process helps both the client and me figure out if we have rapport, and whether we're a good fit to work together in such a vulnerable capacity.

Equally important, and maybe even more so, is assessing who isn't a good candidate for this work. That includes people with certain mental health conditions like bipolar I, schizophrenia, psychosis, borderline personality disorder, or active substance use disorder. I also screen for physical issues that could complicate things, like heart conditions, stroke history, seizures, asthma, and so on. Ruling out those risks is essential, both ethically and for the client's safety, and mine.

The screening usually happens weeks before the first prep session. Once we begin, we work closely for a few weeks leading up to the journey, and then again afterward for integration. The client isn't the only one stepping into a vulnerable space, we're both doing that. Trust and safety are non-negotiable.

ASIP: How do you react as a "DJ" during the session? How are you reading the client in the moment?

Matt: Like I said earlier, I call that part Psychedelic Soundtracking. It's the live, real-time response to what's unfolding in the room. It's how I adjust the music and the energy of the setting based on how the client is showing up, through their words, their silence, or their emotional state.

I might sketch out a rough plan beforehand similar to filling my record box, but as we learned in traditional counseling, I try not to arrive with a fixed agenda. That kind of rigidity can pull you out of attunement. You might miss what's actually happening in the moment. So I see it more like a choose-your-own-adventure book. The client's experience shows us what page to turn to next, and I meet them there musically, just like we do on the dance floor.

ASIP: What are the emotional or energetic markers from beginning to end of your sessions, and how do you approach curating for those?

Matt: At the beginning, during what I call the "Hike", or what others might call the onset, things are usually quiet and restful. The client is often meditating or simply lying still, waiting for the effects to come on. The music is subtle and grounding, the kind of sound that helps you settle in and feel safe, like you're approaching basecamp.

Then comes the "Climb," which is where the medicine starts ramping up. This is when emotions begin bubbling up such as crying, laughing, yawning, trembling, shifting around. That's when I start slowly increasing the energy, emotionality, or psychedelic quality of the music. But it's not about pushing, it's about supporting the rising effects and helping them make the climb toward the peak.

Next is the "Summit," the peak. This is when the medicine is at full strength, and ego dissolution can happen. For some clients, it's a storm of emotion. For others, it's total stillness. Either way, I usually pull the music way back during this time. There's a kind of reverence in that moment that I try to honor. The music becomes very spacious. I leave room for the imagination to soar.

After the peak, we enter the "Return," or descent. This is when the medicine begins to lose strength and agency starts coming back online. Clients might begin to move again, process what just happened, or begin noticing what's unfolding as they slowly return to their senses. The music reflects that with something melodic and comforting, often with a feeling of homecoming. This is a great phase for what I call "music for remembering." It helps the client begin to make sense of what they just experienced.

ASIP: Can you explain the different types of music you use, and what mixtures or styles usually work best and what doesn't?

Matt: Ah, the notorious genre question. Well, I've got a soft spot for the classics such as trippy electronic ambient from the '90s chillout universe, modern neoclassical with lush synths, psychedelic downtempo, and a lot of expansive, cinematic soundscapes. But for me, it's less about genre and more about emotion and visual enhancement. I lean into music that has emotional depth and visual texture. I need to feel it in my body and see it in my mind. It has to stir something, whether that's ache, awe, release, or some associated memory.

One thing I've noticed — and this might surprise some of the more minor-chord-leaning dancefloor DJs out there — is that I often use major chords and melancholic sublimation in sessions. You can hear this approach in Psilocybin Therapy Protocol 1, which I describe more as "The Light." This protocol is typically used in early sessions, especially with new clients. The music holds a tone of beauty, grace, and uplift, not in a naive or saccharine way, but in a way that gently invites the heart to open. It's music that's both sad and beautiful. Sublimative. It doesn't deny pain, it transforms and resolves it.

This kind of music resonates with the core human paradox: the struggle and the gratitude of being alive at the same time. For many clients, especially early on, that emotional tone helps them soften into the experience. It creates a container where the nervous system can feel safe enough to let go. It's the sound of surrender, not force.

On the other hand, Psilocybin Therapy Protocol 2, which I call "The Shadow," leans into darker, heavier, more introspective psychedelic material with minor chords, tension, and the kind of raw emotionality that meets people deep in their grief, anger, regret, or trauma. These tracks are often used with experienced journeyers or when a client is ready to confront deeper material. It's still intentional, it's not "dark for the sake of dark", but it meets the psyche where it's at, and it creates a necessary counterbalance to the more major-leaning, sublimative compositions that I've found effective for therapeutic work.

What doesn't work for me is dry "psy-muzak" that lacks energy or sizzle. Music should ignite the senses, spark curiosity, and take you somewhere unexpected. I avoid tracks that feel too safe or lack depth, intensity, or psychedelic flavor. I'm especially mindful of overly dark, twisted, or unnecessarily heavy beat-driven material (unless specifically requested), as it can easily overwhelm or distract in such an intimate, emotionally open therapeutic space. Keep in mind, this is all highly subjective.

At the end of the day, I'm not choosing music to impress a crowd, I'm choosing it to support the transformation of that audience of one that I previously mentioned. That inspires very different selections than what you'd hear in more underground circles. And that means trusting the emotion more than the genre.

ASIP: Can you share a track or a moment in a set that continues to resonate with you, something you've returned to again and again?

Matt: Yeah, a few come to mind from Audio Protocol 001. For the onset stage, "Take Me By The Hand (Awakened Souls - Acid Dream Version)" by 36 & Awakened Souls. Cynthia's vocals and James's 303 lines are just... divine! It hits that emotional place where people often start crying, not out of sadness, but from that deep inner shift that happens when the medicine starts to open the heart.

Then around the two-hour mark, often when a booster might be kicking in, I'll bring in something like "Out (Poemme Remix)" by Ed Harrison or "Iliad" by Malibu. Those tracks are pure sublimation: sad but beautiful. They hold sorrow and hope in the same breath, and that kind of emotional container really helps people process what's surfacing.

During the descent phase of Protocol 1, I mix "Expand" by Endless Melancholy with the ANNA remix of "Belfast" by Orbital. That pairing was originally inspired by a live session with a client years ago, and the reaction was incredibly powerful, it even brought me to tears. It still gives me chills to this day whenever a session calls for it. Together, those two tracks feel like a triumphant return, a kind of emotional homecoming. And that ANNA remix of Orbital's classic Belfast really hits those "music for remembering" nostalgia buttons.

And that's the goal, not just to bring someone back, but to bring them back home, with self-reflection, meaning, and celebration.

ASIP: There's a lot of talk about "set and setting." What do people often overlook when preparing for, or recovering from, a journey? What are people most surprised about?

Matt: The number one surprise is always how different the journey ends up being from what they expected. People say they have no expectations but of course they do. We all do. And then the medicine shows them something totally unexpected. Sometimes they're shocked by how powerful it is. Other times, they're amazed at how safe or courageous they feel when they assume they'd be terrified.

That's always my favorite moment: when someone realizes they've reconnected with a part of themselves they forgot was even there. That's the real magic.

In terms of preparation, a lot of people forget to start living the life they want on the other side. They wait for the journey to fix them. But I encourage clients to start having conversations with their future selves to ask, "What should I be doing now to get ready for who I'm becoming?" It's like tending the garden before the rains come. You clear the weeds, loosen the soil, and plant the seeds of intention. Then the medicine knows where to land.

And then there's the basic stuff: avoiding alcohol, stepping back from news and social media, doing breathwork, staying mindful. These small choices really do help the nervous system prepare to navigate the psychedelic space.

Post-journey, people often think the afterglow will last forever. It won't. The high wears off. Life gets lifey again. That's why integration is crucial. Psychedelics aren't a fix. They plant seeds, but you still have to water them.

We go over all of this in the screening and prep sessions. The journey is just one part of the process, but it's everything around it that makes it sustainable.

Matt Xavier (center), Joel (2nd from left) and I with friends at one of Matts parties in Topanga. Photo by Jill Sutherland.

ASIP: We've previously talked in depth about how the practice of curating music as a guide is hard to protect, people can copy your sets or your tracklists, for example. So what makes a guide special beyond musical choice?

Matt: It's true that in this day and age, you can't really guard your IP like we did back in the day such as covering our records to fend off curious trainspotters. Everyone has access to the same tracks now, and artists are getting paid less and less as streaming takes over. So spreading the word is essential to the growth of the artists who make the music we use in sessions. That's part of the reason I'm so vocal about giving credit to the artists I use and directly supporting them whenever possible. 

But what really makes a guide special isn't just the music. It's how you show up. It's your ability to attune. To sense what's needed. To recognize that music, like a psychedelic, is a medicine. And that your presence, your pacing, your sensitivity, all of that becomes part of the treatment.

A guide needs to know how to work with both the music, the moment and the psyche. They need to understand trauma. To regulate their own nervous system. To hold space for whatever shows up, whether it's grief, rage, laughter, silence, or pure cosmic awe.

And honestly, I think anyone doing this work should have at least some training in counseling or psychology. It doesn't have to be academic, but you need to understand how the human psyche works and how to guide and counsel someone who is trusting you with their most vulnerable states. Otherwise, you'll be unprepared when the real material surfaces, and you can unintentionally do harm.

ASIP: What are some of the most enlightening, unexpected, or just fun outcomes of your sessions you've seen over the years?

Matt: I love that question. There are so many. The most enlightening thing, for me, is just the privilege of sitting with someone who's opening themselves up that deeply. It's sacred, and it never ceases to amaze me. To be trusted in that way, to be invited into that kind of vulnerability, it still humbles me every time.

There've been moments where people just erupt in tears, and five minutes later they're laughing uncontrollably. I remember one session in particular, which I wrote about in the book, where the client went from deep sorrow and grief into a spontaneous outburst of joy. I followed him musically, moving from "Forever In A Moment" by Black Swan & Endless Melancholy, and then dropped a custom edit of Junkie XL's "Intergalactic Space Travel." The energy exploded with color, and that supported him into full catharsis. I followed that with a beatless track called "Lunar Landscape" by Sacred Seeds to help him land again and integrate that emotional purge. He said afterward it was one of the most cathartic experiences of his life.

Or a more recent session, where the client arrived saying they were excited and had prepared to go deep. From the start, they kept asking me to turn the volume up, and if you know the Adam Audio S3V monitors, you know they can get proper loud. I was stunned at how clearly the client knew what they needed, not just to enjoy the music and the experience, but to actually break through something. I remember giggling to myself as they kept yelling for more volume. It was wild, and totally inspiring! Not only did it help them push through their own blockages, it helped me realize I'd built up some of my own limitations around what's "allowed" in a session.

Sure enough, the volume amplified the psychedelics and helped them access deeper levels of release. Like the client, I was deeply humbled.

And that's the thing, to be allowed to witness these kinds of moments, to be part of it in any way, I don't take it lightly.

ASIP: What advice or recommendations would you give to any DJ who wants to apply some principles of your practice to their own sets, maybe in more intimate or personal settings?

Matt: First and foremost, move slowly. Get properly trained, and do your own deep work before guiding others. Study psychology, counseling, trauma and, of course, psychedelics and psychedelic guiding. Understand what it truly means to hold space, and know your own limits. This will help you recognize who you can, and shouldn't, be working with.

Curate your therapeutic medicine bag. Go through your music library and pull out the tracks that have helped you in difficult moments, the ones that comforted you, inspired you, and made you feel more human. Find the intimate instrumental pieces you turn to when you're alone. These are the sounds that will serve as sonic tools in your practice.

This isn't a dancefloor so don't get caught up in beatmatching; focus instead on emotion and vision. Learn every nuance of your tracks, their qualities, moods, and shifts. Know which ones calm, which ones activate, which ones expand, resolve, or which ones are trippy. Think about how each song might align with different phases of a psychedelic journey, and allow yourself to experiment with the fun of soundtracking the various moments of your life.

Above all, recognize the sacredness of this work. When someone enters a psychedelic state, they are profoundly open, and you hold responsibility for their safety. The music, medicine, and counsel you provide can either support their healing or add to their struggle. That weight should never be taken lightly.

As the saying goes, "Go slow and dose low. You can always take more, but you can't take less." Stay humble. Don't set out to save the world before you know what you're doing. Listen deeply to your music, your medicines, and most importantly, your clients. Because in the end, they are trusting you with the most vulnerable parts of themselves, and that is truly an honor in this lifetime.

~

May/June 2025.

Matt Xavier | Website | Soundcloud | Instagram

Words + Photos ANDREW PARKS

If there was ever any doubt as to the staying power of Green Day, it was obliterated before the punk band even hit the stage at Target Field in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday night. Aside from the obvious — a stadium that felt much fuller than it had for a fierce Smashing Pumpkins set — there was no denying the sudden energy spike as Queen and The Ramones had their biggest hits (“Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Blitzkrieg Bop”) blasted the way they would be at a proper baseball game. 

By splitting the difference between pogo-oriented punk and operatic rock, Green Day wasn’t just ensuring a grand entrance. They also seemed to be tipping their dye jobs toward the two divergent forces (grand ambition and true grit) that informed their biggest albums: 1994’s diamond-tipped Dookie and 2004’s Broadway-bound American Idiot LP. 

You read those years right; much like Woodstock’s mud-caked pivot towards the mainstream (arguably Green Day’s breakthrough moment), Dookie recently turned 30. And American Idiot, well, it’s old enough to drink in every country but ours. They’ve both aged as well as the band, too — as likely to drive nearly 40,000 people wild as they’ve ever been.

Maybe even more so considering their original fanbase is in full-on nostalgia mode, and the group can now afford to punctuate their many overlapping hooks and melodies with dynamic light displays, towering backdrops, and fire-spewing speaker cabinets. All while barely taking a breather despite having played both albums in full, along with a handful of other hits (“Know Your Enemy,” “Brain Stew,” the song that said goodbye to Seinfeld). 

As for where American Idiot‘s political bent falls in a far more contentious year than the one that gave George W Bush another go, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong had this to say: “We need unity! And this is fucking unity tonight!”

Then, after quickly squashing any Democrat vs. Republican discussions, he added, “This isn’t even a party tonight…. It’s a celebration! I want you to scream out for joy; are you ready?” 

They were all night, to be honest. Thanks to absurdly tight performances by The Linda Lindas, Rancid, and the Pumpkins — a band long criticized for bloat, cramming 13 crackly originals and one cacophonous U2 cover into a one hell of a power hour — a concert that started at the ungodly hour of 5:30 and ended close to 11 never felt that way. 

More like a reminder of what made the MTV era and shows like 120 Minutes so vital in the days before digital music. Or as Rancid guitarist/vocalist Lars Frederiksen said before launching into a lovely rendition of “Ruby Soho,” “Thanks for the last 33 years…. If there’s none of you, there’s no us.” 

 From artist Laura Harling: 

 Since October 7 there has been a steady stream of reports about the kufiya: their growing use and visibility, and, in response, efforts to squelch or silence or even arrest people for wearing them. I'm too overwhelmed to keep a full accounting, but occasionally I will try to post about the phenomenon. Here's one incident. Layla is a grad student in Social Work at Columbia, very active on Twitter/X and elsewhere.

Interesting film, "Palestine Red Crescent Society" (1979, dir. Monica Maurer and Samir Nimer). Filmed in 1978 in Lebanon, it examines the development and the work of the PRCS. Its work encompasses not just pre-natal health and "normal" medical functions, but also the treatment of the wounded and the rehabilitation clinics that handle those mutilated or left handicap by periodic Israeli attacks and the Lebanese Civil War. Attacks on Palestinian health infrastructure did not start in Gaza in 2023....